However, the shareholders have agreed in principle that Cefetra will take on the stock and forward book – an agreement expected to be finalised and executed during February.

‘Sad day’

Managing director of JE & VM Dalton, Peter Fox, said: “Given that our grain business has been in existence for over 40 years, naturally this is a sad day.

“We are fully committed to UK agriculture and have done everything we can to avoid this day, but given the structure of the market place, have had to finally accept that our involvement in grain is no longer realistic.”

Speaking to Farmers Weekly, company director Matthew Dalton said while it had been a painful decision, the shareholders had been keen to come out of grain trading in a managed way, so avoiding any risk to creditors.

“Wellgrain quite clearly did not manage that and we did not want to get into the situation they were in,” he said.

“We made sure we took this decision long before it had an impact on the balance sheet and weren’t able to come out of it in an orderly fashion.”

Mr Dalton said as a smaller merchant they had found it “nigh on impossible” to make enough of a margin for the numbers to stack up.